Johannesburg, 17 Jun 2010
Strate, the authorised Central Securities Depository (CSD) in South Africa, has rolled out a high availability solution with IT systems, software, hardware and consulting services provider, Datacentrix, enabling the company to improve its disaster recovery capabilities as well as its management and control.
Rory Martin, technical lead: infrastructure and messaging at Datacentrix, explains that the project encompassed the implementation of a highly available Distributed File System (DFS) solution, an upgrade from Active Directory version 2003 to 2008, a load balanced Microsoft Hub Transport and Client Access Server, a Microsoft Exchange 2007 CCR WAN GEO cluster, a load balanced Microsoft Exchange 2007 Edge server and Microsoft Forefront Edge Security.
"Datacentrix also supplied and implemented the necessary hardware for this project, with a number of Datacentrix teams working in different areas within the Strate environment at three sites, including the company's Illovo head office, as well as its Randburg and Sandton data centres," he adds.
Says Manoj Puri, Strate's Head of IT: "E-mail has become an increasingly critical part of Strate's business and we felt that our previous set-up, where the IT department had up to 48 hours to sort out any mail-related issues, was simply not fast enough. We were also faced with the dilemma of what to do should our Illovo-based site, where mails are scanned for spam and viruses by MAILsweeper and Microsoft Forefront before being sent on to the relevant mailbox, not be available.
"Based on this, we opted to create a second mailbox in a cluster environment at our Randburg data centre, thus splitting the cluster over two sites in different geographical locations, a complex and unique procedure."
Puri states that there were a number of challenges around this approach as Microsoft does not recommend working over two separate networks, but that these issues were overcome by Datacentrix. "Now we have a backup of our mailbox. Should the first site go down, then it only takes around 20 minutes to reroute mail via the second site. Once this side of the project was completed, Strate decided to allow for mobile access and so also implemented an Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) server."
In addition, the company has upgraded its Active Directory environment from version 2003 to version 2008, which is enabled on all three sites, and from four Active Directory servers to five at the Illovo site, two in Randburg and one in Sandton. This means that should one site fail, both the remaining available sites can be used for authentication.
"Finally, a highly available file server environment was created using Microsoft DFS to build a file server for staff critical files at the Randburg data centre. Prior to the implementation, restoring this data could take up to 10 hours. Now it can be completed within 20 minutes. To test the file server, Strate ran on the Randburg site Exchange and file server environment for an entire week and users did not notice the difference.
"Strate has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Datacentrix," Puri continues. "We find that Datacentrix always takes the time to fully understand our needs and the advice we have received has been invaluable," he concludes.
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